It's no Justified, but that new Capote show is pretty good

Also: the enrollment cliff, sports orgasms, bean recommendations

Since it debuted at the end of January, people have been asking if I’ve seen Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. It was briefly one of the most popular shows in America, and I’m sort of a Truman Capote enthusiast—I wrote a book about my obsession with his most famous work, a process that entailed reading or watching most of what exists about him. (Which is saying something—even now, forty-odd years after his death, the man’s a cottage industry.)

I wasn’t planning to watch Feud. I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. I didn’t want to be annoyed when it got something wrong. The chapter of his life it focuses on, ten years after he finished In Cold Blood, was never that interesting to me. The show’s set in New York and is about writers and rich people, three more strikes against it. And I haven’t really liked a new TV show since sometime before the algorithms rose to power.

But a few people whose taste I trust said it was good. Then I finished rewatching Justified, maybe the greatest television series of this century,¹ and its similarly excellent spinoff. So I gave Feud a try. By the third episode, I was hooked. As I write this, only five of the eight episodes have aired. I can’t tell yet if the show is actually good, or whether people who don’t care about Capote would or should like it. But I do.

It looks the part. The sets and costumes are pretty, and most of the season is directed by Portland’s own Gus Van Sant, whose nonlinear style works nicely for a story that has a lot of timelines in play. He also does some interesting things to blur reality and fiction, like including archival footage and filming some scenes in black and white.

The cast is full of cleanup hitters: Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Lange, Demi Moore.² It has cameos by a lot of underrated actors like Rebecca Creskoff, Marin Ireland, and Chris Chalk.³ And they picked the right Capote, no small feat. Tom Hollander nails his voice and affect, managing to totally inhabit Capote despite not looking much like him.⁴

I generally like Feud’s writing, too. Jon Robin Baitz adapted a book I haven’t read⁵ for the script. Every episode has a handful of lines that are bangers. It’s also sly and inventive in the way it fictionalizes events while retaining a sense of realness.

Feud can be meandering and melodramatic at times, like Capote’s own work. (How much Feud reminds me of Capote’s work is one of my favorite things about the show, and something that might be lost on much of its audience.) The fifth episode, in which James Baldwin takes Capote out on the town, is a dud. The usually reliable Chalk struggles to channel Baldwin—in fairness, who wouldn’t—and it doesn’t help that his character’s role in the episode is to make a series of speeches explaining obvious subtexts. Then there’s the issue of having the only Black character in the entire show arrive just in time to set the white hero back on course, which seems a bit too Bagger Vance.

But I still love the show on balance. I think it’s mostly that third episode. Shot in black-and-white, it focuses on the Maysles’ early documentary about Capote—it’s known by various names, thanks to a confusing title sequence—a film I watched many times while writing a section about it in my book. The movie being filmed in Feud hardly resembles the actual documentary, which was only thirty minutes long, filmed early in 1966, and focused almost exclusively on the aftermath of In Cold Blood.⁶ The show invents an alternate reality in which Capote hired the Maysles to shoot his famous Black and White Ball, which occurred later that year and was perhaps the peak of his career and fame. That fictionalization allows the episode to establish the main themes of the show: writing and power, portrayal and class.

The first two are obvious. The third I’ve written enough about, as it relates to Truman Capote, for one lifetime. The class angle was, unsurprisingly, most interesting to me. So far, the show doesn’t devote enough time to that idea, except for a few didactic moments in the Baldwin episode. And class has—also unsurprisingly, considering the class of people who comment on the arts in America—hardly been mentioned in the show's reviews, which have been decidedly mixed. That feels like an oversight. If the central question driving the show is why he betrayed the Swans, one obvious answer is because they’re extravagantly rich, and Capote—like most anyone who grew up the way he did, not to mention much of America—resented rich people.

Most coverage of the show I’ve read has focused on what is and isn’t true, a response as predictable as it is banal, or whether or not it’s fair to Capote, which is deeply ironic considering how he treated others in his work. “La Côte Basque, 1965” might be his best-remembered betrayal, because it was about wealthy, powerful New Yorkers. But, as I’ve written at length before, he did worse to better people in In Cold Blood.

The funny thing about a show like this, right now, is that a lot of people who see it will believe its fictional version of these events. How much of its audience will bother to read up on what’s “true”? Even if they do, I’ve read multiple explainer articles that get basic facts about the situation wrong. In 1965, when he published In Cold Blood—and ten years later, when he published “La Cote Basque”—the audience didn’t much know or care what was true. They just wanted a good story. I’m guessing that hasn’t changed.

Like Capote’s writing, Feud takes huge liberties with the truth, is campy and melodramatic, and often makes its characters seem monstrous. The serrated irony of using his approach on him is what makes the show so great, at least by my lights.

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I’m low on reading recs this month. I’ve mostly been reading old novels—True Grit, My Antonia—and there’s not much left to say about those. I did love this (paywalled) essay by Kim Brooks about taking a family cruise vacation. One of many reasons why is this paragraph from near the end:

On the last night of our vacation, Beth told me that the secret of being a single woman is that “it’s actually not hard at all. Being in a relationship is hard. Being married is hard. As long as you have a community and good friends, being single is easy. But you have to pretend that it’s hard. You have to pretend that you’re sad and lonely, because otherwise every woman would want to do it, and then society would fall apart.”

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I also appreciated this Substack post by Matt Seybold, whose podcast I’ve recommended here before. I hadn’t considered that the so-called academic enrollment cliff—which is indeed constantly mentioned in academia, often as justification for dubious changes—might be false, exaggerated, and/or racially biased. But he makes an interesting case. And the larger point he made in the original Twitter thread, about private equity trying to dismantle higher education for short-term profit—essentially doing the same thing to colleges it’s been doing to newspapers for years—should be self-evident to anyone who works at a large university right now. 

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I never thought I’d be the kind of person who recommends beans, but here we are. Rancho Gordo beans are awesome. I just made the best chili of my life. (Also partly because of the vegetable broth I got at H Mart whose label I can’t read but whose fifth ingredient is MSG.) I haven’t made beans from scratch since I was a prep cook at Don Teodoro’s Mexican Restaurant (RIP!) in high school. I forgot how good they can be. Maybe Thoreau had a point in that boring-ass passage of Walden that made me give up every time I tried to read it.

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Speaking of H Mart, I just moved a few blocks away from one. It’s my new favorite place. I’d only previously known the Korean-American grocery chain from the title of a good book by Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast. Now I have a cabinet full of mystery chips and swing by twice a week.

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I have a new favorite sports-adjacent podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out. It’s been around since August but I just started listening. Torre’s a sports journalist—I first became a fan when he co-hosted High Noon, a show that was too smart for ESPN—but his podcast really isn’t that sportsy much of the time. Two recent favorite episodes were about gun control and orgasms in sports. He also recently did a fantastic interview with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe.

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Recently, C told me about her friend Dan’s band, True Green. I’ve been listening to his new album, My Lost Decade. I like it a lot. Give it a listen:

1. Not a joke. Don’t make me write a whole post about this.

2. The last one might be a stretch, but Moore does steal some scenes, and I respect anyone who makes it from Roswell, NM, to Hollywood.

3. All of whom were also in Justified.

4. He might make a better Capote than Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hell, he might make a better Capote than Capote, whose widely panned performance in his only movie role, written especially for him, led his biographer Gerald Clarke to write that he couldn’t play himself convincingly. Feud includes a scene on the set of Murder by Death in an early episode.

5. And which, based on this mordant review, I probably won’t.

6. The film was unavailable for decades—if I remember right, there was some kind of issue with the Maysles not obtaining the proper clearances—and seems to exist mainly in unauthorized copies on YouTube.